Jimmy Fallon Makes the Best Argument Against BigWind

But a few years ago, when he was host of Weekend Update, Fallon made one of the best arguments ever why solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy work very, very badly….

“…in the future, cars could be powered by hazelnuts. That’s encouraging, considering an 8 oz. jar of hazelnuts cost about $9. Yeah. I’ve got an idea for a car that runs on bald eagle heads and Faberge’ eggs.”

In other words: if your form of energy is UNAFFORDABLE, who cares it it’s based on the sun or works in a lab?…

The diluteness problem is that the sun and the wind don’t deliver concentrated energy—unlike coal or oil—which means you need a lot of materials per unit of energy produced….mFor wind, they can include high-performance compounds (like those used in the aircraft industry) for turbine blades and the rare-earth metal neodymium for lightweight, high performance magnets, as well as the steel and concrete necessary to build thousands or tens of thousands of structures as tall as skyscrapers.

Here’s a comparison of how steel (and iron) intensive it is to generate electricity from wind as compared with coal, nuclear, or natural gas….

The only way for solar and wind to be truly useful, reliable sources of energy would be to combine them with some form of extremely inexpensive mass-storage system. No such mass-storage system exists, because storing energy in a compact space itself takes a lot of resources. Which is why, in the entire world, there is not one real or proposed independent, freestanding solar or wind power plant. All of them require backup—except that “backup” implies that solar and wind work most of the time. It’s more accurate to say that solar and wind are parasites that require a host….

As you look at the jagged and woefully insufficient bursts of electricity from solar and wind, remember this: some reliable source of energy needed to do the heavy lifting. In the case of Germany, much of that energy is coal. As Germany has paid tens of billions of dollars to subsidize solar panels and windmills, fossil fuel capacity, especially coal, has not been shut down—it has increased.

Why? Because Germans need more energy, and they cannot rely on the renewables.

If you visit Fairneny — and people are; people from Savoy, in particular, where a wind farm is being proposed — he will likely employ colorful language to explain to you why industrial wind turbines are a bad deal from the standpoint of noise, alleged health risks, and impact on the environment and property values. "We're screwed here," he say […]

WPD Canada has stated that the company’s board of directors have decided not to proceed with an appeal of that decision, and will not be moving ahead with what would have been an eight-turbine project.

The construction of a larger 30 megawatt capacity wind project in the same general area northwest of Kimball where a decommissioned wind project has existed in the past will triple the amount of power generated.